HK’s Belt and Road Schol­ar­ship scheme comes to Myan­mar

THE Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry this week signed a mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing with Hong Kong’s Ed­u­ca­tion Bureau on strength­en­ing co­op­er­a­tion.

Specif­i­cally, Hong Kong launched the Belt and Road Schol­ar­ship to en­able Myan­mar stu­dents to pur­sue un­der­grad­u­ate stud­ies in the city start­ing with the 2019-20 aca­demic year.

Up to 10 schol­ar­ships will be of­fered an­nu­ally to Myan­mar stu­dents who are en­rolled in first-year un­der­grad­u­ate pro­grammes at pub­liclyfunded in­sti­tu­tions in the Spe­cial Ad­min­is­tra­tive Re­gion.

The schol­ar­ships will cover an­nual tu­ition fees for spe­cific pro­grammes. The first 10 schol­ar­ships will be funded by do­na­tions from the Hong Kong­based Chi­nese Gen­eral Cham­ber of Com­merce and its as­so­ci­ated foun­da­tion.

Myan­mar is the fourth coun­try to join the schol­ar­ship scheme, af­ter In­done­sia, Malaysia and Thai­land.

The agree­ment signed this week cov­ers the pro­vi­sion of schol­ar­ships for stu­dents, ex­change of ex­per­tise and ed­u­ca­tional lit­er­a­ture, teach­ing aids and demon­stra­tion ma­te­ri­als, and ex­changes of aca­demics, stu­dents and ed­u­ca­tion per­son­nel.

“Sign­ing the mem­o­ran­dum with Myan­mar to launch a new Belt and Road Schol­ar­ship scheme can fur­ther in­ter­na­tion­alise Hong Kong’s higher ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor and en­rich our pool of tal­ent with an in­ter­na­tional per­spec­tive,” Choi Yuk-lin, Hong Kong’s un­der­sec­re­tary for ed­u­ca­tion, said.

The city’s leader, Car­rie Lam, paid a his­toric visit to Myan­mar last Septem­ber in an ef­fort to step up its en­gage­ment with ASEAN and pro­mote Bei­jing’s Belt and Road Ini­tia­tive.

Since Oc­to­ber 1, tourists from Hong Kong, Ma­cau, Ja­pan and South Korea have been able to visit Myan­mar visafree, while main­land Chi­nese tourists are been of­fered visas on ar­rival.